Syadvada is the Jain doctrine of qualified assertion: every statement about reality should be prefixed with syat, "in some respect" or "from a certain point of view", because reality is many-sided and no single statement captures it whole. It is the linguistic expression of anekantavada, the doctrine of non-onesidedness, which holds that a thing has indefinitely many aspects and that any account selects some and omits others.
The apparatus is formal rather than merely cautionary. The saptabhangi, or sevenfold predication, sets out the possible qualified assertions about any predicate: in some respect it is; in some respect it is not; in some respect it is and is not; in some respect it is indescribable; and three further combinations of the indescribable with the first three. Alongside it stands the naya theory, an analysis of standpoints, substance-focused and mode-focused perspectives and their subdivisions, with the accompanying rule that a standpoint asserted as the whole truth becomes a fallacy, nayabhasa.
The doctrine's classic illustration is the parable of the blind men and the elephant, in which each man touches a different part and reports the whole to be a pillar, a rope or a fan. The parable is not exclusively Jain and appears in Buddhist and other sources, but Jainism made it doctrinal rather than merely illustrative.
Two things are commonly misunderstood. Syadvada is not scepticism or relativism. Jainism holds firmly that there are truths, that its own metaphysics is correct, and that omniscient beings know reality completely and without qualification; the qualification attaches to the partial knowledge and partial statements of the unliberated, not to reality. And syat does not mean "maybe", it means "from this standpoint", a distinction Jain logicians were explicit about and which their opponents were repeatedly accused of ignoring.
The doctrine had a polemical use, and Jain philosophers deployed it against rival schools by arguing that their disagreements arose from each absolutising a single standpoint: the permanence emphasised by Vedanta and the impermanence emphasised by Buddhism are both true of a thing considered under different aspects. Opponents replied, from Dharmakirti onward, that the position is either trivial or self-refuting, since the claim that all claims are one-sided is itself a claim; Jain logicians answered that their doctrine is stated with the same qualification and applied to itself consistently. In the modern period anekantavada has been presented, by Gandhi among others and by many twentieth-century Jain writers, as a resource for religious tolerance and intellectual humility, a development of the doctrine into a social ethic rather than a straightforward statement of its classical use.